THE RESILIENCE OF THE ANGLO-ITALIAN HEROINE IN MARGARET COLLIER GALLETTI DI CADILHAC’S BABEL (1887)

In 1807, Germaine de Stal's novel Corinne, ou l'Italie (Corinne, or Italy) established the myth of the poetess as an Anglo-Italian heroine who subverts social conventions by leaving her British fatherland to realize her literary talent in her Italian motherland.A precursor to the Romantic Byronic hero, as firstly asserted by Ellen Moers (1977), de Stal's transnational protagonist chooses to identify as an Italian performing poet, an improvvisatrice, thus capturing in the image of the Italian woman a trope of independence and resilience; that is, a romantic heroine whose artistic genius and passionate sensibility render her able to express human feelings, aspirations, and sufferings.Consequentially, she is also a hypersensitive individual who is exposed to human feelings and behaviors.In other words, the receptiveness that heightens her creativity is simultaneously at the root of her vulnerability.A rewriting of Sappho's story for the nineteenth century, Corinne, or Italy affirms a public artistic role for a woman poet and simultaneously establishes her as a tragic, vulnerable heroine who, having been abandoned by the novel's hero, loses her artistic talent and, in the end, dies.For many nineteenth-century British women writers, indeed Corinne was "the archetypal figure of female suffering and vulnerability" as Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler state in their collection of essays Unfolding the South (2003: 2).Following de Stal's example, who "asked her readers to re-think their preconceptions about women, art and the Italian peninsula" (1), at the start of the twenty-first century, Chapman and Stabler in their volume called for the re-evaluation of the complexities and variety of the interactions of nineteenth-century British women writers and artists who traveled to or resided in Italy with the peninsula's Risorgimento politics and